RescueTime Blog

[This Guest post was written by Scott Scheper, an entrepreneur, writer and investor based out of Southern California. Scott writes about truths and lessons that show how to get focused in our age of distraction. Through his online book, http://howtogetfocused.com, Scott releases chapters individually and leverages the comments from his readers in order to edit and enhance his book.]

Ever wondered why Facebook keeps releasing redesigns? I mean, the old design was fine, right?

Facebook provides an atmosphere to keep up with your friends in a neat, simple environment. This was Facebook’s edge. It was Facebook’s value proposition. In part, this is why Facebook surpassed its over-crowded competitor, Myspace.

Yet one thing remains certain: Facebook is a business. And in order for their business to thrive, they must make money.

In this piece, we’ll explore the “why” behind Facebook’s redesign. The goal is not to call out Facebook for being a distraction. After all, it’s probably the most useful online utilities, as it centers on cultivating relationships with friends. The goal is to promote awareness. It’s to make users more aware of Facebook’s goals. It’s to outline how Facebook makes money. And through this, you’ll see how Facebook’s monetization strategy sits is in direct conflict in making you a more productive person.

Facebook’s latest re-design centers on improving two things: (i) Increasing search-based ad impressions, and (ii) increasing overall ad impressions. We’ll explore why below.

I. Why is Facebook focusing on driving up search?

Facebook is driving up its search efforts for three reasons, (i) to combat Twitter, and (ii) to gain more insight into their users in order to advertise them (they’ll log which search terms you look for), (iii) display text ads on the results page.

Think about the people behind Facebook right now. They’re young, they’re smart and they’ve got confidence. Many employees within Facebook think they’re the biggest thing since sliced bread.

Search is a massive business model within the internet. Google is down the street raking in ~$20 billion every year through search. You probably recognize the thought process of Facebook. It likens itself to a caveman’s thought process.

Facebook’s caveman discovery process:

• Google good.
• Facebook good.
• Google a search company.
• Google like information.
• Facebook have information Google can’t have.
• Google make lot of money through search ads.
• Facebook try to be like Google to make big-money-pow.
• Facebook make search more important in redesign.
• Facebook make more money from search.
• Facebook happier

Facebook’s shift towards search prominence doesn’t add more distraction to its environment. I actually support Facebook’s decision to make search a more prominent part of their strategy and revenue model. Yet the fact remains that Facebook’s core revenue model sits on advertising, and advertising’s goals are directly aligned with promoting distraction.

II. Facebook’s Core Business Model: Distraction

Using RescueTime, I observed my time spent on Facebook. By no means am I a Facebook addict. In fact, I rarely ever use it.

“I use Facebook for development and work purposes. I maybe use it 5-10 minutes/day.”

That’s what I told myself. But apparently, I lied. RescueTime found that I use Facebook an average of 35 minutes/day.

How much would you guess the average user spends on Facebook? I mean people are seriously addicted, right? Maybe two hours, maybe three hours?

Nope, the average user spends only 45 minutes per day surfing Facebook; however, crunched into this 45 minute window is an average of ~70 pageviews.

More pageviews equals more exposure to ads (impressions).

Think about that for a second. That’s an average of almost two clicks per minute. There’s likely a wealth of people that drastically exceed that figure. Facebook is crunching out a massive amount of ad impressions in a very short amount of time.

This may prove why Facebook is so addicting. You’re actively engaged immediately after logging in. Before you know it, you’ve just wizzed on 45 minutes, which seemed like 5 minutes. Time flies when you’re actively engaged. And Facebook has done this better than anyone out there.

Facebook’s core U.S. business model centers on advertising. Yes, they have virtual goods in place (in order to monetize the areas where there are practically zero advertisers–like Indonesia, the Philipines, Japan, etc.) Being that their business model is contingent upon advertising, their goal is to drive up impressions, which in turn will drive up clicks (money).

Facebook also has more pageviews than Yahoo’s network of sites, and they’re fast-approaching Google. This means that Facebook has the potential to show more ads than Yahoo’s content network. Yet, Facebook’s ads, unlike Yahoo’s, are significantly more relevant (and also more pricey).

Here’s an example of a Facebook ad:

Yahoo ads are your typical display ads (banners with pictures–Gif or Swf file). See below:

But the images above only show the look and feel of the ads. The key parts sit within the system and algorithms powering the ads. This is where Facebook shines. Facebook has the data advertisers have dreamed of since the dawn of time: knowing people’s true desires.

Facebook knows more about you than you know about yourself

Sure, Facebook knows your personal information. They know where you live. They know where your friends live. They know where your family lives. They know your interests, your goals, your passions, your role-models. However, the true gems sit in the data. It’s more than likely that Facebook logs additional data about you. Facebook knows how much time you spend on Facebook per day. They know what time of day you log in.

Facebook also knows which profiles you click on most. Through this data, they can capture your hidden desires.

Let’s take a use-case example:

Ashley is an average looking 16 year-old high school girl. She hangs out with the nerdy crowd. Her interests include reading. Her favorite music is the Jonas Brothers. She’s having trouble getting over that nerd hump–and the fact that she still likes the Jonas Brothers.

Ashley has 246 friends. Not much for a teen her age. Her average time spent on Facebook outweighs others’ at 2 hours/day.

Ashley clicks on Stacy’s profile an average of ten times a day. Ashley knows Stacy through friends.

Stacy is a popular girl and hangs with the popular crowd. Stacy has 1,200 friends and her wall is always flooded with funny recollections of the previous day and photos–photo’s in which Ashley constantly browses. In Stacy’s profile, it shows that Stacy loves the band Greenday, and Stacy likes “rocking out.”

Guess what types of ads Ashley (the geeky girl that loves Jonas Brothers) will see?

Greenday ads (the band that Stacy, the popular girl, absolutely loves)

Facebook has the potential to carry this out. This is the truest form of relevant advertising. Facebook essentially knows what Ashley wants to be through the data Ashley logs in clicking and browsing Stacy’s photos.

Thus, the more you do on Facebook, and the more distracted you are, gives Facebook more data on what type of person you are; thus, allowing them to deliver more relevant ads.

So the question social networks, like Facebook, ask themselves everyday is, “How can we get, (i) more people using Facebook, (ii) more often, and (iii) get them to see our ads more frequently?”

There are hundreds of ways they attempt to do this (adding features like video, games, fan pages, etc.). However, the main way is through four core distractions:

The Four Innate Distractions From Facebook:

People know me. I'm a pretty big deal.

1. Notifications: Those little red bubbles that display a certain number of messages drive clicks. People love clicking those little red notification icons. This is, in part, driven by the fact that your Facebook inbox displays the same style. And people love feeling important. “Ohhh ahh, someone took time out of their day to message me directly through Facebook? I must be important.” Getting a direct message is more intimate than a wall post. There’s a reason why the Facebook Inbox notification has the same look and feel as other notifications. Facebook wants you to click on anything with a red notification box. And looking at the new Facebook design, you’ll see much more of this.
2. Email alerts: This is Facebook’s way of saying, “Get the hell back over here.”
3. Chat: This is Facebook’s way of saying, “You’re not leaving.” When a friend ping’s you, “Hey! How’s it going? Been a long time. How’s the family?” You can’t just ditch them and leave Facebook. At this point, Facebook’s got you by the balls.
4. Pictures: This may possibly be the biggest source of distraction for Facebook users. As soon as pictures pop-up in the Facebook news feed, say goodbye to 10 minutes of your life. People love pictures. It’s easy, pictures speak a thousand words, and conveniently for Facebook, there’s ads snugged next to pictures.

In order to negate these distractions in the face of Facebook’s re-design, I recommend the following steps:

1. Use RescueTime to set up alerts. These alerts will help you identify and keep track of the time spent of Facebook.
2. Get used to the red notification buttons, and feel comfortable in keeping them unread.
3. Before you login to Facebook I highly recommend writing down your objective in logging in; if you try making a mental note of your objective when logging in, you’ll forget when you’re hit with thousands of social stimuli (friend requests, pokes, wall posts, etc.) For example, write down on a sticky note, “Logging in to wish my cousin a happy birthday.”
4. Turn off all email alerts–anything “Facebook” should not appear in your email inbox
5. Go into invisible mode on Facebook Chat
6. Categorize your news feeds into groups–those that are your close friends, work friends, family, and “rando’s” (by Rando’s, I mean random people that you felt awkward in declining their friend request). This will help you not get distracted with photos posted by randos, as they won’t appear in your family group.
7. Last, LifeHacker put together a great resource of Facebook Apps that help you get more productive
8. Also, don’t forget about Facebook lite: http://lite.facebook.com

In the end, Facebook’s latest re-design centers on increasing notifications and boosting their search usage. Facebook is definitely moving in the right direction in terms of captivating users; however, it’s critical to understand how and why time flies when surfing Facebook. Hopefully the overview and tips above help you focus and become more productive online. Until, the next re-design, good luck.

Copyright 2010 creative commons How to Get Focused

Quite a while ago, RescueTime started allowing premium users to track detailed activity inside their applications, and, later on, websites as well. Here, I’m going to discuss how we are going about providing this feature, and then what complexities remain for some currently untracked (and some tracked) applications. Premium users are then invited, from inside RescueTime, to request details for their favorite applications and websites that do not already have it.

You might wonder what mechanism allows us to track this information: we strive to maintain a secure and lightweight, minimally intrusive application, and didn’t want to go spelunking around in your system to uncover this. The answer is surprisingly simple and actually very powerful: in most cases, the window title of your current application lets us know, and often it may provide even more valuable details for those who wish to mine their own data.

Let’s look at a few examples for the application TextMate:

alert.rb — RescueTime
plan.rb — RescueTime


You can see here that TextMate puts the file name AND the project name in the title. In fact, this is even more valuable than what we were originally looking for (the document name). With this result you can search for results by document OR project name, and you can even use the TextMate project name as a keyword for our Pace projects keyword suggestion feature.

Here’s an example from a website, Google Docs:

User Flow - Google Docs
Google Docs - Folder - RescueTime


As you can see here, Google Docs also provides interesting information. However in this case there is some redundancy– in general we’d rather have too much information that we can clean up for you than too little, with poor resolution.

This brings to fore the crucial technique behind activity details: we can apply fixed rules to modify these window title details on a per application basis. For example, Apple’s iChat app, when you have multiple chats open but are using the tabbed mode, sets the title as “3 Chats” or “4 Chats”. While this number might be a wee bit interesting, mostly it just makes for noisy results: we’d as “separate” activities every time you added or closed a tab. So we apply a rule on all iChat details: if it looks like “X Chats” we just alter it to be “Multiple Chats”.

Clearly, for sanity’s sake, we try to keep these rules strict, sensible, and simple. In most cases we don’t need any special rule. Any time a new application is enabled for details, if we get customer requests for details adjustments, we make our best attempt to accommodate them, if possible. This is especially applicable for those of you with complex internal web applications.

Certain applications that make extensive use of modal windows pose challenges to us. The chief example here is Adobe’s creative products. Currently, if you move to a modal window to adjust something on your image, we would get the name of the modal window, but not the current image being edited. This proves less than ideal for designers who have a strong interest in tracking time by particular images for clients. For this reason, we do not have details enabled on these kinds of applications. We are working hard on a solution that meets customer needs here. In the meantime, our Pace product offers designers another way to tie time spent and tracked by RescueTime back to clients and projects.

Finally, a few notes on privacy. Users will quickly notice that Mail is the other top-used application for which there is no or limited detail provided. During internal testing, we found that window titles for almost all mail applications include the current message subject in the title. We quickly determined that there was no good predictable way to remove it by rule, and that it posed a pretty significant “oops” moment of privacy risk. Some other apps the put conversation level detail into titling are Skype and Twitter. We have a work around for Skype, but continue to consider and monitor others.

Which brings up a feature under consideration for which we welcome your input: would it be valuable for you to control which applications get details tracked yourself, on your account only? Feel free to comment with your opinion, or to submit feedback through the website.

Now, for you premium users, here’s the candy at the end of this long post: you can now request details for any application that doesn’t currently have them by using the Time Reports / Activities view and clicking on an app or website that doesn’t have a (# documents) addend. You’ll be on time detail page for that activity, which offers a link for making the request. This puts it into a queue we check (usually quickly) and update your favorite app. Keep in mind the limitations just discussed above.

(These are full size screenshots, so widen your screen to full width.)
Look for “api.rubyonrails.org” in the Activities list:

Now, we clicked on it, and are on its detail page:

We can click the green text to indicate our interest.

[note: some data in this post is missing-- given that we work on and troubleshoot our own software, sometimes we don't get to log ALL of our time in a week, but it's consistent enough that I don't think it skews these results in a big way.  We also had a vacation in each of the months in question for 1 team member]

So about a month ago, the RescueTime product team decided to experiment with working from home to see how it would effect how we spend our time.  The initial plan was to run the experiment for a week, but we realized that we were paying too close attention to the affects of the experiment and would let it “bake” for a few more weeks to get some better data.  The data (4 weeks of it) is in, and there are a few surprises.

The control – Team of 5 Working from Work (in the office!)

Total computer time logged: 582h 20m
Dev, Design, or writing time: 224h 20m
Communication/meetings: 225h 10m

Efficiency Score: 1.33 (RescueTime calculates this score based on the ratio of self-identified productive activities versus distracting ones)
Productive apps/sites: 504h 50m
Distracting apps/sites: 61h 15m
Neutral apps/sites: 16h 15m

The experiment – Team of 5 Working from Home

Total computer time logged: 657h 50m
Dev, Design, or writing time: 287h 20m
Communication/meetings: 223h 20m

Efficiency Score: 1.30 (RescueTime calculates this score based on the ratio of self-identified productive activities versus distracting ones)
Productive apps/sites: 543h 20m
Distracting apps/sites: 72h 28m
Neutral apps/sites: 42h 02m (much of this is Google Chrome for the Mac, which RescueTime currently doesn’t track sites for– likely split between productive and distracting)

So the ratio of activities doesn’t seem to be meaningfully different.  There are less meetings (“drive by” meetings and formal ones are both tracked) but there’s a lot more IM and email.  That’s not what we could’ve expected.

But what seems to be hugely different are the totals.  Take out the commutes and the longer lunches, and the totals are quit different.

Here’s a chart:

It doesn’t look like much, but 5 people logged an extra 75 hours in a month, with the vast majority of those extra hours being productive development or design hours (about 63 extra dev/design hours were logged in the working from home month).

How we FELT

Obviously, working from home isn’t just about the hours logged.  When talking to the team, feelings on the experiment were pretty mixed:

• Most people felt like we weren’t working as hard from home and it felt like a better work/life balance.  Turns out we were working a fair bit harder, but the time reclaimed made it feel more relaxing.
• The team felt a bit less energized…  The synergy that you get when people are bouncing around ideas is pretty cool– we had a bit less of that (though we had wednesday lunches that helped a bit here).
• People worked odd hours.  Working from the office forces you into the 8-6 mode and makes it awkward to tune out in the afternoon if your heart just isn’t in it.  Conversely, when you put in your 9+ hours at work, you’re a lot less inclined to work in the evening (even if you were spinning your wheels all day).  I think it’s better to work when you feel like it than to force an artificial schedule.
• People were lonely, but dealt with it.  We all joked how excited we were to see our wives when they got home.  I personally made a much greater effort to be social with friends.  This was a lot better than the “I just want to get home and veg out” instinct that I tend to have after a long day at work.

Conclusions

Working from home gives folks a lot more time in front of a computer, if that’s what they are after.  With commutes, associated setup/teardown time, getting coffee from starbucks, lunches, and people dropping into the office, we’re all losing hours.  To be clear, all work and no play is a bad idea…  The really interesting thing about working from home is that we felt like we weren’t working as hard, but were actually logging about 22% more development and design hours.

What we’re going to do Next

A lot of us have expressed that, despite all of this, we kinda miss the office.  We’re talking about next steps.  I’m personally interested to try a hybrid approach.

[edit: Important note!  This is a new feature and (like most brand new features we release) might have a bug or two that we'll be ironing out over the coming day or two. ]

Recent Updates

[edit] On Nov. 16 we improved the offline time entry in the project editor.
[edit] On Nov. 17 we added support for query by project name to the data API.
[edit] On Nov. 18 we changed the project time editor to offer 24 hour schedule.

It’s Friday the 13th- a pretty auspicious time to do a major software release, eh?

For a few months now, we’ve been pretty focused on our users who are trying to regain focus and enhance their own productivity.  We’ve tuned up goals and alerts, added the ability to block distracting sites for brief periods of focus, and in general have tried to be the “nagging angel on your shoulder” when it comes to your productivity.

But we haven’t forgotten that lots of RescueTime users track time to help have an understanding of how they are juggling the projects in their lives.  RescueTime heretofore hasn’t been great for tracking projects…  But that’s about to change!

Introducting RescueTime Pace

RescueTime Pace attacks a very different (but complementary) business need than we’ve been attacking.  Every day people painstakingly (and inaccurately) fill out project timesheets so that they, their clients, and bosses can understand:

• how much time projects are consuming
• which clients need to be billed and how much
• how each project is broken down.  Are projects humming along?  Are they bogged down with excess communication?
• Are projects on track to finish on time?  On budget?

It’s occurred to us (and quite a few of our users– thanks to all for prodding us on this!) that RescueTime is already tracking individual tasks.  All we really needed to do to allow project tracking is give people the ability to assign blocks of time to a project in a given day.  With a few cues that RescueTime can offer, entering your time no longer has to be a painful memory exercise.  Not only can we suggest which project we think you were working on (via smart keyword matching), but you can mouse over blocks of time and RescueTime will tell you what you were doing during that time.

Here’s a screenshot of what entry looks like:

We’ve also enhanced offline time on the assumption that once you start tracking project time, you need the ability to add and edit more granular tasks that might be away from your computer.  The offline popup (if you use it) has more options and an optional detail field.  You can also add/edit offline time with the project time tool shown above.  Here’s what the new offline popup looks like:

Once you have assigned project time (accurately and in a fraction of the time a normal timesheet), you then have project specific reports about how project time breaks down, what the totals are, and how efficient your project really is.  The reports should feel pretty familiar to existing RescueTime users.  For groups, you can easily jump to an hour-by-hour (or day-by-day) timesheet for any user in the system with a handy menu.  Screenshot of the new navigation to the right.

What about Existing RescueTime Customers?

This feature set is a standalone product built on the RescueTime foundation.  It’s available by itself or bundled with the great productivity features that you’ve hopefully grown to love.  Our existing paying customers get the bundled version free of charge … But because these features could be pretty noisy if you don’t want them, the project tracking features are turned off by default.  You can turn them on here.  Existing Solo Light (free) customers don’t get it for free, though if you mention this blog post in an email to me (tony@rescuetime dot com), I’ll try to wrangle you a discount on the upgrade at very least.

What’s Next?

As with all things at RescueTime, this is just a beginning.  The next (and most important!) step is to hear what you have to say.  What’s confusing, what’s missing, what would make it great for you?

[Update: We've modified the link below to point to the current production release of RescueTime for OS X since it now supports both 10.5 and 10.6]

Hello intrepid OS X early adopters!  We’ve built a new version of RescueTime that is optimized for (and doesn’t crash or leak memory all over the place like the one that’s up on the download page right now) OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

You can get it here.

Please note that this build includes the FocusedTime beta features as well, which you can either try out for us or ignore if you’d rather just keep using RescueTime as you have been.

This is technically a beta version, as we just got our hands on 10.6 yesterday and haven’t tested it internally extensively yet, but it at least works much better than the existing version of RescueTime on Snow Leopard.

Send bugs or feedback to team at rescuetime dot com.

[Update: We have completed Beta testing this feature. Thanks go out to all of the people who helped by providing bug reports and a lot of really good suggestions. We gave out a number of Solo Pro upgrades. Keep an eye on our blog post for upcoming opportunities to get yours!]

As Tony pointed out in last week’s blog post, we are getting ready to roll out a feature that allows people to voluntarily turn off some of the distracting portions of the internet.

We’re looking for some people that would be interested in beta testing to help us tune this feature.

If you are interested in participating you can download the beta version of RescueTime from:

RescueTime Beta Installer For OS X

RescueTime Beta Installer for Windows

Browsers Supported:

• Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari for Windows – Opera support will come later
• Safari, WebKit, Firefox, and Minefield for OS X

As an extra incentive, we will be giving out a limited number of Solo Pro upgrades to beta testers that provide us will exceptional feedback and bug reports on the new feature.  Send bug reports and feedback to:  team AT rescuetime.com

[note: the features discussed below will be launching within a week or so.  Get started ASAP and, when the features go live, RescueTime will be much smarter about the stuff that's distracting you!]

We’re currently working on a feature that we’re really excited about and we’d love to get your feedback.

What it does is this:

1. In the menu of the installable part of RescueTime is an item that says, “Get Focused…”
2. It pops up a window that looks something like this:

For the duration that you enter, we’re going to turn off the bad/distracting parts of the internet.  You’ll be sent to a block page like this.  Your “get out of jail” cards include:

• telling RescueTime that we’ve mistakenly categorized this site as distracting (we’re pretty good at defaults and you can edit your list, but a false positive is theoretically possible)
• Doing a simple math problem.  Our goal here is to create just enough work to make you think about what you’re doing.
• Force-quitting RescueTime.  The geeky among you realize that you can kill the process (though that’s a touch harder than the math problem.

So here’s the question for you– we’d love to hear back in the comments:  How sharp should the teeth be?  Ideally you’re focusing for short bursts (30-45 minutes) – should we let you out or force the commitment?

More details below if you’d like to hear more about our thinking on this feature.

Why Build this Feature

The web is getting scientific.  Specifically, it’s getting scientific about separating you from your time.  Entertainment and news sites are doing multi-variate testing trying to maximize the metrics that matter in their business.  That is: pageviews, time-on-page, and bounce-rate (a measure of whether you look at more than 1 page).  They’re getting good at these tests, and it’s costing us.  Even the best of us.  We’ve all experienced that moment where we look at the clock and realize, “Holy crap– I just spent 2 hours surfing when I really wanted to be getting things done!”.

A while back, we were inspired by a really cool app for the Mac called Freedom.  Basically, it allowed you to turn off the entire internet for a fixed period of time.  The only way to turn it back on again was fairly costly- a reboot.  Surely this was a great tool for short bursts of self-imposed focus!

But it didn’t take too many tries to realize that the internet is just too central to how we work.  Google Docs holds critical information that we need ready access to.  It’s nigh-impossible to code without access to the huge pile of debugging info and tutorials that Google search gives us access to.  Designing is crippled without the internet as well– stock image sites and color palette inspiration sites are a big part of our design process and we can’t get quick feedback on a design direction if we can’t post it to Skitch and IM the team a link.  We needed something that only turned off that distracting bits of the internet.

So we moved on and tried LeechBlock, a nifty Firefox plugin that allows voluntary blocking.  But we quickly ran into painful limitations here as well.  The distracting swaths of the web are vast– Leechblock allowed you to create a list of distracting domains, but www.facebook.com doesn’t catch 3rd level domains like app.facebook.com.  And a friend can IM you a link to a funny website that you’ve never been to (and might never go back to) which can be a huge distraction.  Managing that list is imperfect and time consuming.  And, of course, Firefox isn’t as big a part of our browsing lives as it once was.  Many of us use Safari or Chrome.  And, from a product design point of view, it’s hard to ignore that a big mess of people still use IE.  A solution that enforces across all browsers seems critical for something like this.

So, as of now we’re internally testing the “Get Focused” option and loving it.  We don’t have to build lists of distracting sites, it works in any browser, and it has enough “teeth” to keep us honest without actually locking us in a closet.  What do you think?

Last night we switched on document and activity detail tracking for several of our most popular applications. Starting last night, if you log time in these applications and have the “Collect Window and Document Titles” setting turned on (in either your v1 RescueTime Data collector or on the Monitoring Options settings page if you have the v2 Data Collector), you’ll start to see subtotals by document or activity start to show up in your details reports.

You can expand the rows for these applications to see break down by document name, or activity (like the name of the person you were chatting with for IM applications). There’s also a new Top Activities report for applications that collect detailed information, so you can see who you chat with the most, or which spreadsheets take up the most of your time. Combined with the addition of our new keyword search filter, you’ll be able to dig deeper into your time than you’ve ever been before.

Here is a list of the applications we currently support (Windows and Mac):

Development Tools and System Utilities

Terminal
iTerm
TextMate
Xcode
Interface Builder
Aquamacs Emacs
Windows Explorer
Finder
Navicat
Command Prompt
Visual Studio

Chat / IM / Communication

MSN Messenger
Skype
Yahoo Messenger
AIM
Trillian IM
Adium IM

Office Applications

WordPad
NotePad
MS Word
MS Excel
Acrobat
PowerPoint
Visio

Other

Quicktime Player
VLC Media Player

I wanted to write a quick post regarding our absolute commitment to data integrity. And what better time to do that then when we’re busy working behind the scenes to correct some data integrity problems that we discovered today.

Based on results of our validation processes after the upgrades, we found a small number of data inconsistencies for data we processed on Feb 25th and felt it was in the best interest of our users and ensuring the integrity of the data to re-run our upgrade.  No data sent has been lost and we plan on having your RescueTime data available for review as soon as possible.  Your RescueTime clients will still continue to dutifully send us accurate data, and we promise to report it back to you just as accurate  as it came in.

Thanks for your patience with this.  We’d rather fix things we broke then try to brush them under the rug and hope nobody notices.

UPDATE (3:16 AM PST THR)

We’ve verified a fix and are processing data for all paid accounts first.  Free account data will follow slightly behind.

UPDATE 2 (4:04 AM PST THR)

Paid account data for yesterday (up to Feb 25 at 8PM PST) is all processed.  We’re now processing all free account data and everything new that has come in since then.  There will be some delayed data for the next 4 hours.  It could take a few hours to see new data until we fully catch up.  The website is now available again.

UPDATE 3 (9:35 AM PST THR)

All data is current, repaired, and keeping up with live incoming client reporting. RescueTime has now returned to normal operational status.  Thanks once again for your patience.

UPDATE 4 (2:50 PM PST THR)

We’ve been tracking another issue where people’s time is coming in as something different than what it had been before (ex. MS Word is now winword) and the new app/site isn’t tagged or categorized properly.  We’re taking the site down to merge the data into the correct records.  Once that’s done everyone’s data should be correct again.  We haven’t lost any time, it’s just been put in the wrong buckets.  We’re fixing the buckets.

UPDATE (6:45 AM PST FRI)

Looks like we got everything fixed.  The website is back up.  Your data should be properly tagged and categorized once more. Many, many thanks to Montana Low, Mark Wolgemuth, and Joe Hruska for their hard work and long hours.